On Black Cultural Elements Embodied In Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston, one of the greatest writers of American literature in the twentieth century, is acknowledged as the Mother of Black Female Literature. As a novelist, anthropologist and folklorist, she is quite active in the Harlem Renaissance. She was struggling to preserve the African-American cultural tradition for all her life and spent most of her time and efforts to collect, collate and record the vernacular, religion and folkloric culture of the Southern blacks living in America. And she creatively put these black cultural elements into her literary creation, which endows the novel with distinctive local colors.As a writer who contributes a lot to black culture in Harlem Renaissance, Hurston doesn’t protest against racial discrimination and oppression, since she realized that the development of black literature needs to excavate black culture’s spiritual connotation—independence, freedom, equality and enthusiasm. Hurston’s own experience makes her realize that spreading African American culture is the only way to raise the blacks’ self-respect and self-confidence, and make the black culture survive in the white-culture patriarchal society. Her viewpoint is shown in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God, which reflects her deep love for African American culture and her sense of national pride. In addition, Hurston also creates the novel from the perspective of black women, and helps them to find their own way under the oppression of race, gender and class. Hurston believes that black culture has been perfectly presented on the black women, and finds new room for its development, when combined with black women’s self-pursuit.This thesis aims to research the black cultural elements involved in the novel from three perspectives:linguistic characteristics, religious features and folkloric traits.Chapter One is the introduction section, which mainly introduces the life of Zora Neale Hurston and the plot of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the bond between Hurston and black culture, as well as the present research status of the novel at home and abroad.Chapter Two focuses on the linguistic characteristics in Their Eyes Were Watching God. One of the most striking features in this novel is the employment of the real dialect of black rural life. On the one hand, with the unique spelling and syntactic structure of the Black English vernacular, Hurston not only makes the novel full of strong local color and rich cultural connotation, but also makes the narrative language more vivid and the characters more distinguished. On the other hand, with the intersection of black vernacular and Standard English, Hurston makes the black dialect blend into black culture to create a literary language to embody strong Negroid characteristics.Chapter Three mainly analyzes the religious features in Their Eyes Were Watching God. The religions mainly involved in the novel are two kinds of African traditional religions (Voodoo and animism) and Christianity. Firstly, Hurston adopts the goddess in Voodoo as the prototype of the heroine Janie, which shows her opposition to gender discrimination and her affirmation to the importance of black culture. Secondly, Hurston explores the issue of spiritual return in animism from three aspects:the nature endowed with divinity, the return to nature, and the harmonious interpersonal relationship. This is a positive animistic thought, which is important for the African Americans to strengthen their ethnic self-confidence and sense of belongings. Thirdly, Hurston employs the question-and-answer interaction of the black sermon to show the charm and blackness of the black culture.Chapter Four presents Hurston’s deep love of black cultural tradition from the perspective of folkloric traits in Their Eyes Were Watching God. To reiterate the importance of the cultural heritage to the construction of black cultural identity, Hurston brilliantly blends various elements of black traditional folk culture into the creation of this novel, such as black folktale as well as carnival songs and dances.Chapter Five summarizes the discussion of the black cultural elements represented in the novel from the perspectives of linguistic characteristics, religious features and folkloric traits so as to reconstruct the black cultural identity. African American culture is an indispensible part of American culture, the great contribution made by African Americans to American culture, and the cornerstone for them to construct their American ethnic identity. With the employment of black cultural elements in this novel, Hurston attempts to arouse the re-recognition of its value and improve the self-confidence of the black people so as to construct their cultural identity, become better integrated in American society, and keep black women awakening as well.